Key resellers are facing an end to their business model. Gifting by email is being phased out by Steam. Direct gifting (user to user) looks like the only model to do this now.

Only bought one game from CD Keys and was surprised to find the key actually worked, so its a bit of a shame (for us) this grey market is going to go away.

That is the ultimate dick move if it turns out to be as severe as it seems. Valve can do one if this ends up shutting down all the retailers online who sell keys. The monopoly they have over the market is already so large that they can keep games at RRP for months on end on Steam. I go to competitors online because quite frankly no game is really worth £40-60 anymore, let alone weeks and weeks after release.

Fair enough if they're just trying to stop scammers on markets like G2A or people selling cross borders who take advantage of currency conversions. But if this starts killing off completely legitimate sites who offer Steam keys at better rates than Valve then that is going to push me away from Steam in a huge way.

Guess I'll be going back to buying games 12 months later when they crop up in a Steam sale. Even the games I look forward to and buy on release I would hesitate to pay the Steam release price when I used to be able to get them for £30 or less on CDKeys.com and the like.

The reason why these key sites can sell games cheaper is because they are mainly taking advantage of cross border currency conversions Mantis. I personally don't have any issue with companies doing this.

As I understand it this change is for stuff you buy on Steam and then gift to someone. So the key resellers will be fine as they are not doing it this way, they buy the codes outside of Steam.

Aha, fair enough. I only gave the article a cursory read so that's fine. I understand now why most of the people kicking up a fuss are the ones who buy copies of games to keep in their inventory for giving as gifts. I'd be surprised if the third party websites were actually buying their codes directly from Steam when building up their stock.

It will effect things like the G2A marketplace though which does tend to use codes bought off Steam, but it's a very dodgy market so not something to shed a tear over losing.